When MJ ran Ed and used WAW Tadeusz as an NPC, he had another NPC describe Tad's praying when he was doing a miracle as like something they had never seen before. The idea being that even people used to perhaps a miracle or two were surprised at the far reaches of spiritual power being accessed when Tad did his world-healing spell (for those not there, it stopped billions of people from dying. So major effects.)
Now, MJ did not describe this in depth. How could you? I've never met anyone faintly that close to being able to do such a miracle. I've met a few people who've testified to various miracles in their lives, but nothing on that big of a scale.
So, this stuck with me as I wondered how to give more detail to this, more life, flesh it out, and so on.
One way that occurs to me is to work with God. Seek His will in the situation, and then pray for it. Ask a question, and then when you get a no, change the question. Or wonder if the question is dumb, and you're supposed to be asking another question. Its a series of very small spells that guide you into the right way to ask a larger question which works on up to perhaps a module (computer programmers break down really large programs into modules). So you get the modules developed and make sure thats in order, and then move on to sticking them together, and then to finally activating the whole thing.
Another way to look at it...
You're in a dark room with an occasional bit of matchlight. A voice in the dark is giving you instructions on how to put together a time machine....mostly as you're blind. But the voice can see perfectly.
Never mind for the second post.
Of course, part of the probability factor in performing any divine magic is the question of the divine will--it's always possible that failure means God (or god) did not want to do that in this situation.
But the idea of stringing smaller spells into a big one is valid, and using 7@7(?) informations to get God to answer questions as you build toward the miracle itself is an interesting approach. Were I designing it, though, I would want to say that some minimum number of some maximum number of such spells would have to succeed for the miracle spell to work, all of which gives a bonus to the success of the miracle (because they are necessary spells as components of the big one). It also means that you probably know from the beginning what the miracle is going to be.
In the second novel, Merlin and Lauren have a discussion about using magic to do what they think should be done. Lauren asks whether they shouldn't get God's approval before deciding what they should do with magic, but Merlin points out first that in everything they do God has entrusted them to make decisions, and it is part of their place as God's servants to advise Him and work on His behalf as they see best. That's part of the whole holy magic package, that the one praying is telling God what God's will ought to be in this situation, and God is showing that He agrees.
What would be more difficult, but not impossible, would be to design a sort of spell set which inquires of God what it is that He wants and so builds a bonus toward whatever holy magic spell follows, based on the successful use of the previous skills. It would combine a 7@ information with some kind of 1@ skill success bonus. The game difficulty is deciding who decides what God wants. My norm is that the dice decide based on what the player requests and whether it works; the informations system would have to have a way of conveying to the player which skill he should use, and that means the referee has to decide the will of God. For that, a GE roll seems best, but that again implies that the player has a clear preference in the matter, and if the player is playing this the way it is suggested, he doesn't.
I'll think about it.
--M. J. Young
One advantage of the stringing together is that its more describable. It would turn the spell into something more like a conversation and a series of riddles and bits of self-revelation and the hero would be changing his thoughts as he went along. It could be a much different and more detailed experience of a miracle.
In game, this would make the experience stretch out a lot longer. In a book, it might be the whole of a decent sized chapter.
You'd have a general idea of what you want to do, but by the end it would be a lot more detailed, and a number of your assumptions going into it would have been altered, sometimes substantially. You might want to cross the river with the refugees and you're thinking parting Jordan, but God leads you to creating a stone arch over the river because he knows that the pursuing tribesmen will be able to jump the river, and that in a couple days you're going to have to flee back to the other side.
So yeah, it requires thinking of what you think God would want to happen in that situation with God being aware of the limits of the tools He has to use. You could use a GE roll to see how beneficial all factors involved in the situation are--that is, '3' and everyone is resisting God's guidance but the verser, and a number of bad consequences from previous bad choices are coming to fruition. Or '30' and everyone in the area is going to do God's will and the end result if the verser is successful is likely to be astonishing.
It would be most interesting to see a collection of Christian miracle workers and see their differing methods and rationales. Someone with this methodology would disagree deeply with Merlin. "Its better to make sure that all our actions are within God's will than to risk acting on purely our own judgment."
The early shows of Joan of Arcadia differed from the later ones. Later ones had a theme. Early ones...
Joan sees God as normal people who know things they could not know. They give her commands, but never make her do it.
In the early shows, she does something that seems stupid. It then kicks off a cascade reaction that when everything fits together makes things a lot better for everyone.
Its a show about how God sees the whole plan, and you have to trust that He knows what He's doing when he tells you to do X which seems dumb.
This seems a good model for the GE roll in my post above. Good GE roll and all those pinballs bounce just right.